Great Chicago Fire

On this day in 1871, the Great Chicago Fire began in the barn of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary, and, by the time the blaze died out two days later, a large swath of the city had been devastated and some 300 people killed. 1871. 

Killing at least 79,000 people, an earthquake struck the Pakistan-administered portion of the Kashmir region and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. 2005. 

American domestic lifestyle innovator Martha Stewart reported to a federal prison in West Virginia to begin her five-month sentence for insider trading. 2004

In Italy‘s worst civilian air disaster in nearly 30 years, a Cessna took a wrong turn on a taxiway at Linate Airport in Milan and crashed into an SAS airliner about to take off, which exploded, killing 118 people, including 4 airport workers. 2001. 

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1970.

British politician Clement Attlee—who, while serving as prime minister of the United Kingdom (1945–51), presided over the establishment of a welfare state in his country and the granting of independence to India—died at age 84. 1967. 

A prominent communist figure in the Cuban Revolution and a South American guerrilla leader, Che Guevara was captured and later shot to death by a Bolivian army. 1967.

Corporal Alvin York single-handedly captured 132 Germans and killed another 25 during the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I. 1918. 

In Canton (Guangzhou), Chinese officials boarded a British-registered ship, the Arrow, arrested several Chinese crew members (who were later released), and allegedly lowered the British flag; the event contributed to the start of the second Opium War, in which Britain and France battled China. 1856.